I also work together with and consult EnforceDigital on numerous projects, incl. such with the world’s most famous fitness model on the social media — Lazar Angelov.

Currently, my main focus is the Digital Marketing of pCloud, a Cloud Storage Platform which grew from 2,000,000 (when I joined) to 7,000,000 in a year and a half.

Here is a list of the top digital marketing tools you should learn to use in 2017.

Google Trends

Google Keyword Planner

Ahrefs

AppAnnie

Serpstat

SimilarWeb

Buzzsumo

Facebook Audience Insights

Facebook Ads

Google Adwords

Bing Ads

Google Analytics

Facebook Analytics for Apps

Yandex Metrica

Color Picker

Google Analytics URL Builder

Tag Assistant

FB Pixel Helper

Google Tag Manager

Data Scraper

Google Analytics Debugger

Pocket

Bootstrap Studio

Canva

Design Wizard

Flatpack

Marvellapp

Adespresso ads

Lapa.ninja

Behnace

Dribbble

Unsplash

Sendpulse

Headreach

Buzzstream

Pitchbox

Active Campaign

pCloud

Todoist

Jira

Confluence

Evernote

Slack

Digital marketer

Webris

Neil Patel Blog

Medium

Search Engine Land

Ahrefs Blog

Jon Loomer Blog

Hubspot Blog

Content Marketing Institute Blog

Buffer Blog

GrooveHQ Blog

MOZ Blog

Adespresso Blog

Zerolens

Linkio

Hope you find this interesting.

Digital Marketing Research Tools

Research is essential to the success of any marketing campaign.

Without proper planning and research, you are making your tasks when starting a campaign a lot harder. Always do your research and plan this will not only make your job easier but you will learn a lot more things in the process.

Mainly because you can learn almost everything about your competitors with the Ahrefs Site Explorer.

What it gives you is the opportunity to learn where your competitors get traffic, where they rank for specific keywords in Google Search, how many backlinks and who exactly links to their website and much more.

For instance, you can set “Alerts” so each time a website ranks for a keyword or receives a mention somewhere on the web.

Also with their “Content Explorer” they give you the opportunity to find the most shared content on the web.

Here you can see the most shared article about iPhone cases with a total of 91k shares.

You can, of course, filter that in many ways.

Ahrefs Keywords Explorer 2.0

It has an enormous database of keywords and you can research keywords in 170 countries.

It shows you accurate search volume data, how many searches are with clicks and how many searches remain without clicks.

Another awesome thing about the keyword tool is that it shows you the keyword difficulty in other words. How hard is to rank for that specific words.

It has a ranking history graph, a very detailed SERP analysis with all the data you need in order to make a plan and a marketing strategy.

Last but not least, thousands of keyword ideas with all the metrics you need to know in order to make your decision easier.

Since I make my decisions based on data I can say that I really like how Ahrefs works.

What it does is give you an estimated traffic of a website, what are the sources of that traffic, what are the countries, a basic idea of the keywords that the websites ranks for and some other cool stuff.

I mostly use the Chrome extension that they have because as I said it gives me the information I need to decide if I want to go further with research or not.

Similarweb Chrome Extension

For instance when someone contacts me with a review proposition or something like that I open the website and see what traffic that website does and where is it from.

As you know Facebook is the biggest Social Network in the world with an average of 25.5 Billion visits per month, average session duration of 16 minutes and 5 seconds and an estimate of 14.36 scrolls per visit.

Exactly because of those numbers and the ability to collect data Facebook Ads is, in my opinion the most powerful ad network right now. So if you don’t use it for marketing purposes you should learn how and start immediately!

There are many types of ads you can place in Facebook based on where are the users you are targeting in you marketing funnel.

Creating a New Campaign

The ad types speak for themselves but I will try to explain them better with a few words.

Awareness

Boost Posts — This type of ad is for the posts on your Facebook Page (already posted or not) they can be photos, links, videos, events, and offers

Promote your page — If you want to get more likes on your Facebook Page you should use this type of ad because it is optimized for People that are more likely to like your page (based on your targeting of course)

Reach people near your business

Increase brand awareness — This type of ad is to be used when you just want to reach as many people as you want so they learn about your brand

Consideration

Send people to a place on or off Facebook (Clicks to website)

One of the most used Ad types by Facebook Marketers. What it does is that it sends traffic to your website and by default it’s targeted to people that are more likely to click on your ad.

Get installs your app

If you want to drive users to install your app this is the type of ad you should be placing.

Raise attendance to an event

This type of ad is targeted to people that are likely to attend an event based on your targeting.

Get Video Views

One of the most powerful types of ads in my opinion not just because video on Facebook has exploded but you can create Audiences of people based on how long they watched a certain video! This is great because you can create amazing automated funnels based on how people engage with your content!

Collect leads for a business

Another super powerful type of ad that is very underestimated by businesses. You see Conversion rates on landing pages have a lot of variables one of which is the speed of the page. With this type of Facebook ad, you can collect a lead directly on Facebook without the user even leaving.

Of course most of the times the user has to receive something in return so you can send

Him to a thank you page that is off Facebook.

After you have his email you can use it via integration with some of the biggest email CRMs or just download it and use it however you want. No spam of course!

Conversion

Increase conversion (mostly sales) on your website

This type of ad I love the most. For it to work properly tho you need to set up your Facebook Pixel the right way. This means that you have to put it on every page of your website and report different events based on what the user is doing

For example, if a user is viewing a product on your website you must send the ViewContent event.

If he is in the Cart you must send the AddtoCart event.

The most important event you must log in the Purchase event. You must log it on your thank you page with ALL the Parameters that the Purchase includes.

This is very important to do because as I said Facebook has massive amounts of data for every one of us and based on those events it can create a profile of you perfect buyer so you can get the best ROI for your ad spend. Also, you can create lists with people that are similar to your perfect buyer which is called Lookalike audience.

Increase engagement in your app

If you have set your Apps events the right way you will be able to show personalized ads to people using your app. For example, if a user is close to completing a level but hasn’t visited the app in 1 week, you can show him an ad that tells him that he is close to completing that level.

Get people to Claim an offer

As you know your are able to post an offer in Facebook. This type of ad targets people that are most likely to claim your offer.

Promote product catalog

This type of ad is mainly for people that own big store. This a basically Dynamic Remarketing Ads. These type of ads are of the most profitable for marketers because they show to the user the exact product that he was looking at. With these types of ads you can show the user that right now only for him this product has a discount and most of the times he will buy. Dynamic ads increase the CTR and reduce the cost per purchase!

The best thing about Facebook Ads is the Pixel

What the pixel is, is a chunk of code that helps you track what users do on your website.

Based on that you can create personalized ads specially for them.

But that’s not all.

Facebook is so good at targeting it offers you to create audiences that are similar to the people you are tracking. They are called “Lookalike Audiences”.

You can create this kind of audience for the people that have already converted on your website or app.

Based on that Facebook creates a profile and helps you show your ad to people that are likely to convert too.

In order for this to work Facebook needs to gather information so it will not happen right away.

The other thing is that you have to put the Tracking Pixel In a way so it can track the exact steps of a user before he converts.

It can be a bit hard on some websites but by far this is the thing that has brought me the highest ROI based on ad spend.

Google Adwords is very important because you can use a lot of channels that are connected to Google via Adsesnse and Tap into Google Search.

I am sure that everyone has seen this

Google Ads Screenshot

This screenshot has been taken on a 1920×1080 monitor and you can see that 70% of the visible part of the page search results are Ads.

With Google Adwords you can be there. And this is important because of the graph you are going to see next. 36% of people in the US have researched the item from a search engine.

Also the majority of banners that you see in websites are served via Google AdSense. With Google Adwords, you can advertise on websites that are using Google AdSense. You can target them in very different ways.

Keywords -This means that you can target websites or apps that are contextually matched with the keywords you want or have that specific keywords in their content. For example, I want to target articles in websites that are doing WordPress theme reviews. Than I will choose the option only to show my ads where “best WordPress themes” is present in the content of the website

Topics -Here you can target websites on certain topics. For example, you can target websites that usually write about SEO and Affiliate Marketing like so

Interests & Remarketing -This type of targeting means that you can target people based on what Google they might be interested in. The cool thing is that here you have a couple of options. You can choose “Affinity Audiences” — Target People in large numbers based on their long-term interests, “In-market Audiences” — Reach people that are actively searching and comparing products like yours, “Remarketing” — Terget people that already had interaction with your website or app, “Customer email lists” — You can show ads in Gmail to people that have provided you with their Gmail email address.

Placements — Choosing this you can target people that visit specific websites. Let’s say that you sell Macbook Pro Accessories and know your potential customers read Macworld.com. You can tell Adwords to show ads only on this website. To make the targeting even better you can combine Targeting Preferences. What this means is that I can show ads to people who read Macworld.com and read articles that contain the keyword “Macbook Pro Accessories”.

Demographics — Of course, you can target people by their demographic profile too.

Of course this is a very small part of what Google Adwords can do, as I said.

In my opinion, it is essential for a modern marketer to know how it works.

Analytics Tools

There are many data-sources on how many websites use Google Analytics.

In a post from 2015 Marketing land says that Google analytics is used by 30–50 Million websites.

Other data-sources like W3Techs say that Google Analytics is used by 54.9% of all the websites, that is a traffic analysis tool market share of 83.5%.

Either way no matter how many websites use it is one of the most popular analytics tools in the world and if you are Digital Marketer, Growth hacker, Marketing Manager and even a CEO you must learn how to use it.

With Google Analytics you can track everything about your users even what resolution screen they are using.

You can create all kinds of reports and thus learn more about the people using your service.

Where they come from, which channel provides the most leads, sales, downloads etc.

You can even perform A/B testing!

It is extremely powerful if you know how to use it and if you invest more time to understand it you can only win.

Push Campaigns feature is part of the Facebook Analytics for Apps SDK and it gives you the opportunity to send Push Notifications to your users totally for FREE!

There are two types of Push Notifications

In-app Notifications — Pop-up screens that show up while the user is in your application

Push Notifications — Notifications when the user is not using your application

The best part is that you can use Push Campaigns with the Events and instead of paying for ads you can get to your users for free.

14. Yandex Metrica

Yandex is the Russian equivalent of Google so of course, they have their on Analytics.

Yandex Metrika is good for two things the most.

Free heatmaps — Heatmaps basically show where people click on your website. Most heatmap tools are paid but this is not and it’s pretty good

Video recording — When you enable it Yandex gives you the opportunity to watch what users are doing on your website. Yep video. You can’t see the passwords of the users but you can see everything else so use this with caution and make sure you mention it in your Terms of service

Additional Tools

Here is a list of the best tools to make your job as a full-stack marketer a lot easier and get stuff done faster.

So if you have a website and you want to track a lot of stuff you must have a lot of codes placed in all sorts of places of the website. One must be loaded before the other and all kinds of stuff that I promise you, you don’t wanna be doing.

Google Tag Manager takes care of all this.

Basically, you can put all your codes in GTM and put JUST ONE code on your website.

It might be a bit overwhelming if you are not familiar with Basic HTML, event tracking and the concept of how a website actually works but there are a TON of tutorials to make everything clear.

Check this playlist that Ryan Stewart made.

Hope it helps and you start using GTM. No more calling developers to ask them do something because you want to track that button in the footer.

It will change your life I promise.

20. Data Scraper

With this tool you can scrape and download any kind of data from a website. You just define your filters and download the spreadsheet.

I use it manly when I do display campaigns in Google Adwords.

What I do is I tell Google to show me the first 100 results for a given query by adding %var% at the end of the link when I do a certain query and download them.

Than I just put the links in Google Adwords so I can show specific ads in those specific articles.

Design Tools

So what Bootstrap studio is, is how I love to call it “Photoshop for Landing Pages”.

Bootstrap studio homepage

It is an amazing tool built with the Electon Framework [Link] which enables you to create amazing responsive Landing pages and the front end of a whole website really.

It has two options.

You can either build the pages via drag and drop or if you like you can write the code.

The awesome thing is that it has a ton of predefined sections and if you happen to not like one of them you can easily edit it with the HTML, CSS, Javascript editors or you can use the special section which enables you to just type in the text you want, change the color or the width of an element.

Everything you do is updated in-front of you in real time and you can see how your page will look like on different devices.

It is super easy to use but if you are a complete novice in HTML and CSS it might take more time for you to learn how to use it in it’s full potential.

It gives you the ability to create videos (albeit it’s a new addition). But maybe the most impressive thing to me is the ability, not only to resize an image, but to completely change your canvas.

Say, you’re playing around with an image and you don’t like the size. You don’t just want to start from scratch. With Canva, you’d pretty much have to exit out. If you have a premium plan you can resize, but even that isn’t very intuitive.

Design Wizard allows you to see all of the available sizes and change on the fly.

There’s a free plan that will give you an idea of how things work and I definitely recommend giving it a look.

Flatpack is a drag and drop landing page designer. Again I am not saying that those tools are a substitute of a designer or a front-end developer. With Flatpack tho you can create a landing page very fast.

It is pretty easy to use and it’s kind of self-explanatory.

You choose an element you put it where you want and then play with the settings.

It is great just to make a quick test of something. It’s $18 which is an amazing price for what it can do!